Second rendering of beeswax and update on recent hive removal.

hello mr ed here today is august the 19th 2022 walking over to the honey house right now to once again do some more chores but today today's video i'm focusing on a cut out that charlie and i did exactly a month ago today the 19th of july we did the the cut out and i want to do an update on it because these bees have a particular interest to me simply because i don't like doing cutouts during the hot months in the dirt because it's been my experience that bees don't do well when when there's no honey flow and it's hot so it's i'm very curious i haven't opened up that box since they were set up so i'm curious to see what they're doing and how they're getting along and i'll fill you in on all the details but before we get to that and as you can see and probably here in a few seconds it's like really bad outside today let me show you that sky oh yeah it's fixing to come down again it we've been getting a lot a lot of rain here there's a system i don't know if it's tropical that's moving in but i'm gonna try to get this work done um before we get too much rain i might have to stop intermittently and stop and and wait till the rain passes but before we get to the hive in the back i wanna i've got a couple i did a couple more uh renderings of uh second renderings of some wax and i'm getting ready to open up to open up too dump those buckets and i want you to see what we got so let me set the camera up and let you get a good shot on what these beautiful box boxes of boxes beautiful blocks of wax will look like by the grace of god by the end today we'll all have an update on the on the hive condition oh and there's another surprise too about this swarm that i caught in that last video in fact i'll post links to the video of the swarm and links to the video of a charlie and i doing that cut out as well in the description so check out the description if you're interested in seeing those videos all right let's dump out some wax huh this is what our blocks of wax look like inside of the buckets and they are i mean these are gorgeous blocks the second rendering so they should be very very clean just a little bit of trash on the bottom that needs scraping out and we'll find out just how big blocks of wax they are [Music] oh wait look at that beauty right there huh wow all right let's dump out the second one [Music] hmm another gem huh wow and these um i i gotta go away these things and tell you how much they weigh and i also want to show you i re-rendered the two blocks of wax that i done in that last video and i'll show you what what that block of wax came out looking like the rain has chased me inside for the time being it should be clearing up pretty soon but for right now i'm inside and i want to show you this block right here was the one that i had done last week's video on and i added a little bit more wax to it on the second rendering and now this block is right right around 22 pounds right here this one this block right here weighed in at right about 18 pounds and this block right here that one was right around 19 pounds and the size of them 10 and a half inches by seven and a half now they're all gonna be about ten and a half wide and this one is six and a half and it is six and three quarters so beautiful blocks of wax and all that wax right there it's going to be added to that stack of wax right there yeah we're going to have plenty of wax to put on our foundations this year and with the dumping out of the wax and showing it off it's now time to get outside and get busy on what this video is really all about man the smell of this fresh wax is absolutely amazing i always liken it to the smell of like a spring on a clear morning i mean it's just so fresh and sweet smelling it just can't be beat and there is the high that we are going to be looking at today now the first thing you'll notice that it does have two deeps on it however that top super is only basically a shim it's a shim to cover the feeding that i'm doing so i feed the bees internally and if you look at that video that um on where charlie and i remove these bees it was underneath the bay window and it was loaded loaded loaded with honey in fact uh the cone was so misfigured and thick and i couldn't frame any of it up so i wound up crushing and straining it and got over six gallons of honey and now i'm just feeding the honey right back to them and this this bottle was my fifth bottle and this is the sixth bottle that that i'll be feeding them so uh after today's video i'm going to be changing out bottles i think so the that's the first thing is is i'm feeding the the bees and i've already fed them over a gallon back of their same honey and this is what prompted me to to do the video today i looked out here yesterday and right there see that rubber band that is coming out of the hive and so this is just indicative that the comb is now attached to the frames so much now that they're cutting the rubber bands and starting starting to drag them out so let's go ahead and open up this hive and see what's going on and right before i remove the shim box and the inner cover and the honey i want to talk about what i did setting up this this hive i don't remember how many frames of brood that i framed up i i want to say it was either four or five it might have even been six i really don't remember i do know however that at the time that i set the hive that since i wasn't using their honey and generally if i'm able to i'll frame up some of the honeycomb and give it to them but like i said before the cone wasn't frameable and the best option for me was to crush and strain it like i said also most of the cone was wet and at this time of year with the high beetles being so bad wet comb is it's just such an attractant to the uh to the veal so easy for them to get in there lay their eggs and the bees are so stressed from the removal to begin with that they almost neglect doing their duties and so the high beetle they emerge and they basically run the bees off because the bees can't control them at that point so it's it's why i try the best i can to only put dry comb inside of the cutout because at particularly at this time of year with the high beetles being so bad you want to do everything you can to eliminate that possibility of letting the beatles get a toe hold in the hive and then boom ruining the whole situation for you so i only put four or five other frames in there and those frames were drawn out now because my plans are was to feed the bees immediately that's what i did and so what i'm kind of expecting to see is the gallon plus honey that i've fed back to them is going to be stored now in in those frames it's been four weeks so hopefully our queen should have had enough time to lay and we should have some pretty good new brood in there now here it is middle of august and generally our queens are starting to not shut down but slow down and for as far as their production of eggs go so i'm not expecting to see a mass quantity of brood in there but i am expecting to see some new brood uh and and again i don't like doing removals in the summertime due to the fact of the stress one that the bees go under when you do removal the fact that the heat of the of the summer down here in louisiana is so it's just bad for the bees so that adds to the stress and then with the with the idea of stress and beetle threat and robbing out threat the there's just so many things that can go wrong in in doing removals at this time of year for me down here so that's why i really don't like to do them however sometimes the the case just is that the bees have to go and it just happens to be at the wrong time of year so when they do that which is what i did in this one i only put dry brew comb in there and drawn frames of a cone and i'm forced to feed it and if anybody knows me i do not feed my bees only when i have to and this is an instance where i really have to all right let me put my suit on i'm not going to smoke them we're going to just pop the inner cover and we're going to see exactly you're going to see for the first time just like i'm going to see what these bees are up to now there were a lot of bees when we vacuumed this and and one other thing that's very normal after doing a removal is you'll see a decline in the number of bees because like i said bees get stressed out that stress will kill bees that stress also attracts the high beetle and so i know the number is going to be less i think that when i put the bees in there we probably had eight frames of bees good eight frame of bees i don't know what we're gonna see i'm hoping we're gonna see eight frames but who knows so let me put on my suit and we're gonna open up this box and we're both gonna see for the saint at the same time what is going on with these beats now with the cloudy rainy conditions that we have today ideally it's not the best time to go into a hive because we're going to have a lot of our bees in the in the box look at that boy look at those bees sucking up on that honey huh and this is the way i feed them i just put a couple of holes in the in the lid right there and i just put it right over the hole that's in on the inner cover and that's my way i like to feed my bees internally and here in louisiana you want to feed your bees internally all right let's see what's going on open up this inner cover [Music] wow that looks very good and as you can see it was one two three four five frames of their brood that i put in and so then the other five frames these five were drawn comb that i put out and i can see just looking at this that they decide to work these frames right here so i suspect this is where they're storing that honey that i'm feeding because i don't see a lot of stuff on these frames so let's let's pull it off of this side first and see what's going on and i did put drawn comb in here um but they're repairing it right now and i see a little bit of nectar in this outside one or honey they're drawing this stuff out so a lot of this stuff that i'm feeding i'm sure they're using it right now to draw out and so i see there's a high beetle here and there's one right there see that right there there's one so you can get it and there's one right here yes and this is where you're you're you're going to find the high beetles you're going to find the beetles where the the bees aren't patrolling so this is the outside frame there's no bees over here and so this is why you would you would suspect to find high beetles in these areas all right i don't see any on that one let's pull this next frame out and i can see already they've really drawn this comb out because this had gone through the uncapper and chops it up a little bit but you can see how smooth the edges are and you can see the white white comb right here so they they start to build this up draw it out it's looking good and the same as well on this side you can see where the white white cone this is all brand new what they're doing right here [Music] next frame and they've drawn a lot of it out on this side and you you can see how they've gone over the comb over the edge of the board right here and the reason they've done that is because the next piece of comb which is a piece of cut out comb there's a void there and so they they build funny comb and this is what one of the things that the bees will do when you do cutouts if you don't fill up the frame completely with wax then the bees will make this kind of comb that extends into the other frame and it makes taking apart a cut out high very difficult move this one to the side all right and here is our very first frame this mark right here this is how i mark which frame i put my queen on and so when i open it up i can just pull this frame out when i go to release her and i just have to be really careful not to grab another because the rubber bands will they'll form the rubber bands into the wax like they did here and it'll catch on the next frame and you can see at this point right here where they have attached the comb to the frame and down on the bottom as well they've completely attached all that comb to the frame so that's really good this this piece of comb is pretty secure i'm not going to pop those rubber bands because these i'll let them do that they'll they know a lot more about engineering than i do however the ones that are cut i will remove those so that looks very good and the bees are very calm but you can see there's it's the numbers at least on this section are pretty low all right our next piece and again i have to check to the rubber bands this one is already popped so let's go ahead and take this one out as well as this one and you can see i use long rubber bands these rubber bands are seven inch rubber bands and they work very very well to put attach the comb to the frame at the cutout yeah they really cut a bunch of these rubber bands all right let's pull this one out and take a look-see and look at this all this honey that i've been feeding was right here they've capped this honey right here look at that beautiful great job now these bees are very very calm considering what our weather is doing right now all right this next frame i filled it up completely as i'll show you see like this one this area right here doesn't have anything in it so this is where because this area didn't have any comb in it and the frame behind it where the queen was didn't have any comment they they can do some really weird stuff in that open space they don't they don't build comb uniformly and it does make difficult to take up a hive apart at that point but this next frame you can see that i filled the frame up very nicely with cone and as such they did a really really good job and all the rubber bands are cut on this they did a really really good job of attaching that comb to the frames i'm still nervous about tilting it so let me hold it and you can see how i did attached uh put cut those cones in there and put them in there i can smell honey but there's nothing wet in there so that's very good i i don't want to tilt this stuff because it nothing is supporting it and i don't i don't trust it as far as the weight goes all right so let's remove these little rubber bands right here and we're going to set this one back down in here i'm still looking for brood let's pull that next frame up let's see what this one looks like and so that i can see where it's starting to pull this comb off right here so let's separate this out it's all brand new stuff it's very tricky to remove this stuff without causing harm because we don't want to rupture cells and have honey spill out all right good it looks pretty good i'm gonna have to move this one it's attached to the other cone next to it and let's take a look-see at this one again i'm a little hesitant about tilting it i see some old capped brood in here so this must have been the last very last bit like i said it's been a month so that must be the very last bit of the old brew that was in here that um hasn't hashed out yet let's take off these rubber bands all right let's see this oh look at that look at this brew right here now this is relatively new in fact i think i see some uncapita uncapped larva right in there so we know our queen is laying how about that look at that so we got some uncapped right in here and that's awesome it's very good i think she's going to be on this next frame i always say that to charlie she's going to be right right here [Music] all right let's see if we can find our queen again how we like to attach the comb i hate to separate this because i'm opening up honey but they can go ahead and close that up pretty quick quickly because i'm not doing a lot all right let's try this one out [Music] and again some older brew but from the last three weeks that's older brood right there i'm looking for it right now but i see uncapped brood in there as well so she's she is laying in there and then you can see here this this brood here's uncapped brood so this is all laid within the last three weeks all this stuff in here and and again i'm not expecting to find a lot of brood but just the idea that we have brood is a very good sign of the health of this colony on this side falcon [Music] now if you all see her let me know now these next two frames are drawn comb that i put in here and we'll see if she may be over on that section i kind of i'm not expecting to see her over there because it should just be honey over there and i would imagine you know she's going to be around the brood but this is the the heaviest laid brood that i've seen so far this is a drawing called this they've loaded this thing up and i'm looking for her real quick i see uncapped larva in there right there so she was laying on this frame right here the light is terrible i can't see if there's eggs or anything and then on this side it's all honey on this side so i definitely don't expect the finder on this stuff and i don't see you there either so we'll pull out the last frame since we've done this many already may as well a couple more high beetles on this outside edge hive tool quickly dispatches them all right let's put it back together and [Music] one more quick look to see if we find it now you can see i got him a little bit upset with my moving around to these frames oh there she is right there look at that look at that there she is right there all right so we're going to put her back in and we're going to close up this hive oh any bees that are trapped up in here they can escape right there so i'll just continue feeding them like i said i've still got five gallons or four and a half gallons in there it's there honey i'm just feeding it back to them and they're making good use out of that that honey so that's um i'm pleased that i i would almost want to reduce this high to a five frame or or a nuke or eight frame but i'm going to leave them alone just as it is i'll continue to monitor them and if necessary i will reduce them down to an eight frame i mean i think they would do real well in an eight frame um it's just that i'm lazy and if i leave ten frames and they can keep on building up at the rate of speed that they they want i won't have to keep up or keep ahead of them so that's that's it i mean they're they're in good shape i'm glad that they're here on the back porch of the honey house where i can monitor them really carefully so it's a good thing and i want to do one more thing uh before i end the video and it's just a really interesting story about what happened to that swarm that i caught last week that i brought up here to the abbey let me let me go over to that box and where i'll pick up that story over there now let me tell you what happened to this swarm that i caught the other day and you saw that on the video just caught the swarm it was in the bush just bent the bush down shook the bees into it and and you can look on the video last week you can see when i showed these bees that there might have been two frames three frames maybe of bees in there here's the swan was probably a pound and a half two pounds of bees at the most that that was it and then i i had three frames in there i went and dropped in two frames of honey on the outside edges of it and just assuming about you know they'll just do fine well after i dropped those frames of honey inside of this box came out here is no more than no more than three hours two hours three hours later and i'll be a son of a gun if this hive was not getting robbed out and i can understand that that the swarm hadn't really accepted this box as home they weren't defending it and you know they're out of place and out of sorts and so i can understand how they allow robber bees to come in it was probably an easy deal for them to do it and of course i didn't want that to happen so i still have the tape up here i uh i just got me some duct tape and i covered the entrance i covered the entrance of the box normally when i have a hive that's being robbed out uh i'll cover the entrance and that evening you know the next morning i'll open it up and let the bees go and uh and go their own way hopefully and that they didn't chase the hobbies out of there well i didn't i didn't want to let those bees go i i said you know the the hobbies that are now in this box that that i shook into this box you know i i want them to to stay in there so i said i'm gonna just leave this box sealed up for three days and that's exactly what i did uh i mean i've never done that before i usually like i said just do it you know a few hours later the next morning but this one i left sealed up for three days and i just thought that when i came out three days later that once i once i removed the tape from the entrance and the entrance is just a tiny three-quarter inch little hole once i removed the tape from it that any of the robber bees that were in there for the day they leave because that would be their their escape now but i was surprised to see that no bees came out when the tape was removed at first i thought well did i kill the bees did they get overheated and i said man i gotta look so then i popped the the lid off of this thing and now what i saw was unbelievable when i started out i had two maybe three frames of bees in the box and when i opened it up it was now completely five frames of bees in there those high bees not the hot bees but the robber bees that came in and i closed off after three days this became their home and now they are part of this swarm so in just a matter of days the uh the swarm of bees they they got their own army of collectors now so let me i'm gonna pull the top off of it again and i'm gonna let you see how many bees are in this little box now because remember there used to only be two go back and look on the video you'll see there's just a little bit of these but now there's this maze so check this i don't want to keep the lid off for too long in here but let me just show you what's going on with these bees look at this that's definitely doubled the amount of bees in that hive right there oh my gosh that's a good trick i'm gonna have to try this experiment again robber bees becoming hot bees awesome the hive i mean i'm satisfied with its condition at this time just to be continue monitoring it and then the bonus of catching more bees for that swarm just made it a great day plus you got to see all that wax that we had so that's all i have for you on this one so thanks for watching keep on watching and i'll be making more god bless mr ed i'm outta here until the next video [Music] you

Channel: Jeff Horchoff Bees

Views: 37,080

Keywords: Second rendering of beeswax and update on recent hive removal., rendering beeswax, bee hive removal from house, swarms of bees, robber bees, robber bees in hive, using rubber bands to hold comb on frames, queen bees, releasing a queen bee from a cage, bee stings, Saint Joseph Abbey, honey, feeding bees, feeding bees honey, internal bee feeder, bee feeders, catching a swarm of bees, bee suits, hive tools, jars of honey, inner covers on a beehive, jeff horchoff bees youtube

Id: 7hoayCmRsPc

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022